Aumayr’s figuration is not illustrative; it is disruptive. The works do not depict violence as a discrete event but embed it within the very structure of perception. Mouths become wounds, kisses become incursions, domestic objects such as sofas or pillows bear the imprint of corporeal and psychic distress. The use of highly diluted oil paint on raw canvas heightens this effect: color seeps rather than rests, figures blur into skin-like stains, and the image becomes porous—a soft tissue of affect and trauma rather than an assertive composition.

In this sense, her practice explicitly challenges the legacy of male-dominated figurative traditions that have long aestheticised female pain, eroticised subjugation, or rendered the female body passive and symbolic. Aumayr’s figures do not offer themselves to the gaze; they confront it, distort it, bleed into it. They belong to what Laura Mulvey famously diagnosed as the counter-cinema of “woman as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (Mulvey 1975)—yet in Aumayr’s case, the image actively turns against this logic. Her gaze is not merely resistant, it is anatomically invasive.

Aumayr’s imagery can only be fully understood when placed against the long history of violence in painting—especially the coded, sexualized, often aestheticised violence embedded in canonical European art. From Titian’s Rape of Europa (1560–62) to Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–20), the history of figuration is also a history of gendered aggression—sometimes glorified, sometimes subverted. In the 20th century, this tradition continues with new formal languages but persistent tropes.

A key figure in this lineage is Balthus, whose paintings—particularly Thérèse Dreaming (1938) or The Guitar Lesson (1934)—place young female bodies in stylized poses of passivity, erotic availability, and psychological ambiguity. Balthus’ work has been both canonized and problematized; it exposes the structural power of the gaze without relinquishing its seductive mechanics. What makes Aumayr’s work so radically different is that she does not merely reverse the gaze—she dismantles it. Where Balthus offers cool composition and disquieting control, Aumayr gives us bodily liquidity, emotional interference, and painterly instability. Her female figures are not posed—they are partial, interrupted, fleshy, dissolving. They do not signify innocence, they radiate knowledge of harm.

Another comparative reference is Francis Bacon, whose distorted bodies, often contorted in private psychic pain, perform a masculine anxiety about control and abjection. While Bacon’s figures remain locked in existential isolation, Aumayr’s figuration operates relationally—her gestures point outward, toward gendered structures, domestic violence, affective memory. The brutality in Aumayr’s work is not metaphysical, it is social and gendered. Her painting is not expressionist but structurally feminist.

The figure of the mouth—repeated across multiple works—is emblematic of this difference. In Bacon, the mouth is often a scream. In Balthus, it is often mute. In Aumayr, it is neither: it is slippery, active, ambivalent. The mouth bites, kisses, absorbs, accuses. It is not a signifier of passivity but a site of destabilization. Julia Kristeva has linked the mouth and orality to abjection—the breakdown of boundaries between inside and outside, subject and object (Kristeva 1982). Aumayr paints precisely in this zone of dissolution.

While Aumayr’s paintings explore the corporeal through softness, fragmentation, and atmospheric liquidity, her sculptural works introduce a different material language—one of confrontation, weight, and latent violence. The installation Eintausendeinhundert Klingen für dich [One Thousand One Hundred Blades for You], consisting of two hanging pillows constructed from metallic blades and suspended by steel cables, articulates an object-language of paradox: softness turned hard, comfort made dangerous, intimacy transformed into armor.

This strategy resonates with a genealogy of feminist sculpture that has long interrogated domestic objects as sites of containment, threat, and ambivalence. Mona Hatoum’s Incommunicado (1993), a baby cot made of steel and wire, or Louise Bourgeois’ soft fabric sculptures and Femme Maison series both destabilize the comfort of the domestic interior by reloading it with psychic charge and latent aggression (Molesworth 2005; Bernadac and Obrist 2008). Aumayr’s use of metallic elements—not ornamental but weaponized—extends this tradition with stark clarity.

Where Hatoum often addresses surveillance and state violence through the architectural vocabulary of control, Aumayr’s idiom is pointedly intimate. Her steel pillows are not public metaphors but personal threats. They do not frame an ideological apparatus; they address you, directly, like an accusatory whisper: “For you.” Their affective address is singular, interpersonal, charged with emotional residue. As such, they also recall Eva Hesse’s language of precarious materiality—objects caught between tenderness and failure, structure and collapse (Fer 1999).

In this way, Aumayr’s sculptural work performs a conceptual inversion of care. The pillow—a paradigmatic object of rest and vulnerability—becomes a surface of aggression. This transformation is not simply ironic. It speaks to a deeper logic in her practice: the desire to show how tenderness is often the terrain on which violence is staged. The violence in Aumayr’s work is not theatrical—it is structural, intimate, and embedded.

Aumayr’s affective poetics of embodiment resonates deeply with the legacy of Ana Mendieta, whose Silueta Series (1973–1980) remains a foundational body of work within feminist visual discourse. Mendieta’s practice, grounded in land art, body art and ritualized performance, inscribed female presence into the landscape through ephemeral gestures—blood, fire, soil, imprint—marking absence as presence, and trauma as trace. In Siluetas, Mendieta used her own body or its outline to create vulnerable, transient forms that often referenced cycles of violence, exile, and displacement (Blocker 1999, 54–73). Similarly, Aumayr’s paintings operate within a visual vocabulary of affective residues, where bodies are not depicted in full, stable form, but emerge as stains, fragments, impressions—traces of affect, rather than fixed representations.

The connection lies not in medium or aesthetic resemblance, but in how violence is visualized through loss, softness, and fragmentation, rather than spectacle. As Jane Blocker has argued, Mendieta’s work reveals how “feminist self-representation might proceed through the logic of disappearance rather than assertion” (Blocker 1999, 13). Aumayr’s figures, too, hover in the visual register of dissolution—not claiming the image, but haunting it. Both artists mobilize absence as a form of resistance, insisting that trauma is not something to be shown, but something that infiltrates the surface—materially, emotionally, and semiotically. Where Mendieta used the landscape as site of inscriptive intimacy, Aumayr uses raw canvas, fluid pigment, and sculptural threat to stage a similarly unresolved encounter between body, memory, and violence.

A central analytical thread in Aumayr’s practice is the critical articulation of a female gaze—not as a simple inversion of the male gaze, but as a structural disturbance. The gaze in Aumayr’s work does not rest, does not possess, and does not extract. It is embodied, erratic, affective, and often unstable.

Feminist theorists from Laura Mulvey (1975) to Bell Hooks (1992) and Teresa de Lauretis (1984) have emphasized the necessity of reconceptualizing the gaze not simply as visual control but as socio-political inscription. Aumayr’s paintings engage this discourse not through overt theory but through formal disturbance. Her figural language breaks with visual legibility: bodies are partial, too close, fragmented, blurred. The viewer cannot master the image; they are implicated in it.

This is particularly evident in the recurring motif of the mouth—a motif that in classical art history often served to eroticize the feminine subject or to render her silent. In contrast, Aumayr’s mouths are distorted, swollen, tactile, sometimes uncomfortably close. The viewer is no longer positioned as voyeur but as almost physically present, caught in a zone that resists detachment. The gaze becomes affective, not optical.

In this sense, Aumayr’s work shares affinities with Jenny Saville, whose large-scale fleshy bodies resist idealization and instead insist on presence, mass, and complex desire (Bond 2011). Yet Aumayr’s figures are less monumental than Saville’s—more spectral, fluid, and quiet. Their violence is not in their size but in their implication. A closer proximity might be found with Paula Rego, whose narrative figuration of sexual trauma and gendered violence speaks to a similarly charged ambivalence, often wrapped in domestic iconography (Rego and Warner 2002).

Yet where Rego often stages narrative scenes, Aumayr’s work evacuates narrative. Her images are post-event, pre-language, affective atmospheres rather than stories. The female gaze here is not a perspective—it is a painterly condition, a mode of visual production that undoes the grammar of domination.

What distinguishes Aumayr’s work within the contemporary landscape is not simply its thematic engagement with gendered violence or its explicit visual language—it is the way her images operate against codification, refusing to stabilize in iconographic, symbolic or narrative terms. Her paintings do not ask to be interpreted; they insist on being felt, endured, absorbed. Their politics lies in their ambiguity, in their refusal to render trauma legible, in their capacity to implicate the viewer affectively rather than pedagogically.

In this, her work aligns with a broader contemporary feminist strategy that privileges embodied ambiguity over declarative representation. Scholars such as Amelia Jones have argued for an understanding of feminist art not as thematically gendered, but as structurally disruptive—“where form, gesture and materiality become themselves critiques of subjectivity and power” (Jones 2012, 85). Aumayr’s practice performs exactly this: it does not represent gendered violence, it enacts the distortions it leaves behind—on canvas, in skin, in space.

The violence in Aumayr’s works is not metaphorical. It is formal, psychic, affective. The bleeding edges of her images, the precarious softness of her sculptural forms, the liquefied erotics of her painterly surfaces—all point toward a feminist visual syntax that reclaims affect as a critical force. In an age of algorithmic aesthetics and digital abstraction, her practice insists on the flesh, the stain, the wound. It is both an elegy and a confrontation.

Within a broader feminist genealogy, Aumayr’s practice shares conceptual affinities with the radical affective ambivalence developed by Renate Bertlmann, a key figure in Austrian feminist avant-garde art since the 1970s. Bertlmann’s work, spanning drawing, sculpture, photography and performance, has long interrogated the entanglement of eroticism, violence, and gendered power structures. Her use of contradictory visual languages—glass dildos, latex objects, razor-sharp roses—stages a confrontation between seduction and aggression, often collapsing the distinction between love and threat (Bertlmann 2019, 68–93). Aumayr’s steel-bladed pillows and her softly violent figuration echo this grammar of contradiction: affective proximity rendered dangerous, vulnerability edged with aggression.

More than a shared set of motifs, the deeper connection between Aumayr and Bertlmann lies in their strategic destabilization of desire as an aesthetic category. As Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein has observed, Bertlmann’s erotic objects do not deny desire but “radicalize it into zones of ambiguity, excess, and subversion” (Bertlmann 2019, 15). Aumayr’s visual language similarly resists moralizing binaries: her paintings neither celebrate nor condemn intimacy—they fracture it, overlaying tenderness with latent menace. In both practices, the body becomes a site of affective ambivalence, where visual pleasure cannot be disentangled from structural critique. Through their respective idioms, Bertlmann and Aumayr articulate a feminist refusal to choose between pleasure and politics; instead, they expose the material conditions under which desire is structured, distorted, and inscribed.

If the art-historical canon has long reproduced the logics of possession, display and domination—whether in the leering poses of Balthus, the eroticized violence of Schiele, or the cold cruelty of contemporary fashion imagery—Aumayr’s work returns to the image as a field of resistance and rupture. Her figures do not pose, they haunt. Her materials do not decorate, they injure. Her visual language is not about representing pain but materializing its residual presence.

To look at her work is not merely to witness violence—it is to encounter the aesthetic forms through which violence becomes visible, palpable, traceable. It is also to experience how the female gaze, through disidentification, distortion and affective materiality, can fracture dominant visual paradigms and open new possibilities of seeing, feeling, and knowing.

Aumayr’s work does not offer closure. It offers contact—intimate, disturbing, sensuous, unresolved. The title “You’ve Come on More Faces Than You Have Said My Name” lingers not as a punching line but as a structural metaphor: a poetic register of disproportion, a scream beneath the surface of seduction. It asks not what violence looks like, but what it feels like to carry its residue on the skin.